José Carlos Orihuela ─ One Blueprint, Three Translations: Development Corporations in Chile, Colombia and Peru

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

4 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.

McKinney Conference Room

The forging of development corporations in Andean countries was shaped by the transnational diffusion of developmental state ideas and the TVA myth, on the one hand, and national history, on the other. Chile, Colombia and Peru gave birth to development corporations that exemplify more general features of national state formation processes: an early-established, national-level, state engineers-driven, centralized but deconcentrated mega corporation in Chile, CORFO; a valley-level, local elites-driven, regional development corporation of high organizational reputation in Colombia, CVC; and an early-established but poorly funded, valley-level but with the board of directors meeting in Lima, caudillo-driven and therefore a corporation with comparatively low bureaucratic autonomy development in Peru, CPS. The piece begins by introducing a theory frame bridging new sociological and historical institutionalisms to read and problematize the politics of bureaucratic autonomy. A central argument is that national political processes contingent to developmental state formation mattered a great deal for the translation of the developmental state policy paradigm and TVA organizational model into national practice. National political processes, in turn, were highly dependent on national structural features and already undertaken institutional pathways. Forthcoming in Centeno, M.A. and Ferraro, A., State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain. Volume II: Rise & Fall of the Developmental State. CUP.

José Carlos Orihuela, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. A political economist, his most recent articles are “Institutions and Place: Bringing Context Back into the Study of the Resource Curse”, Journal of Institutional Economics (2018), and “Assembling Participatory Tambopata: Environmentality Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Nature”, Forest Policy and Economics (2017). Also recently, he co-edited (with E. Dargent, M. Paredes and M.E. Ulfe) Resource Booms and Institutional Pathways: The Case of the Extractive Industry in Peru (Palgrave 2017). He is currently carrying out research on developmental state formation, the local resource curse, and the institutions governing protected areas in the southern Peruvian Amazon. A former CLACS Cogut Visiting Professor and Watson Institute postdoc, José Carlos is an Associate Professor at PUCP.